Harmon’s Histories: Grandma’s radio log book a trip across historic airwaves
By Jim Harmon
My paternal grandparents were fascinating people whose lives spanned the late 1800s to late 1900s. Grandpa was a sawyer, a mill worker and a police chief.
Grandma was in charge of all things domestic, from cooking to laundry to literally keeping the home fires burning.
She was also fascinated by a new invention in the 1920s called radio. It is she who I can thank for my interest, and later career, in radio and television.
I recently came across a small booklet of hers which accompanied the 1929 radio receiver my grandparents purchased from the Nott-Atwater Company of Spokane, Wash., in which she kept track of radio stations she could pick up from her home in Libby.
Many of the stations she logged then are still around today, including KSL, Salt Lake City, and KNX, Los Angeles.
But others have morphed into different call letters or have long since disappeared.
KPO, San Francisco, is one example. According to a web-page called bayarearadio.org, the station began as an “experimental transmitter” on April 17, 1922, located in the Hale Brothers Department Store.
Three years later, KPO joined forces with the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper to carry the inaugural address of President Calvin Coolidge.
In early 1926, KPO began exchanging programs with KFI, Los Angeles. Soon, more stations joined the exchange, eventually morphing into the “Western Division of the National Broadcasting Company (NBC).
Grandma Harmon noted listening to KPO on January 31, 1929. The NBC network changed KPO’s call-letters to KNBC in late 1947, and to KNBR in the 1960s.
On Saturday, February 9, 1929, she listened to KLX, Oakland, Calif. I was unfamiliar with that station (or so I thought). It turns out, KXL became KEWB, one of the great rock stations of the Bay Area in the 1960s.
I moved to San Francisco in 1965, so I was able to witness their next makeover, in which KXL reportedly paid $75,000 to KNEW, Spokane, to acquire their call-letters, and change formats to call-in talk radio.
One of KNEW-Oakland’s more popular shows was Don Chamberlain’s “California Girls,” which centered on phone calls from women discussing their sex lives. I doubt my grandmother would have been thrilled with that!
KWEA had been around since 1922, but in 1929 was allowed to increase its power to 1,000 watts, resulting in Grandma Harmon’s first chance to hear it from faraway Louisiana.
On Saturday, February 23, 1929, she noted listening to KGIR, Butte, one of Montana’s first radio stations. It was licensed in 1928, although KEIN (KFBB), Great Falls, has long claimed they were the state’s “first.”
Of course, both KGIR and KEIN/KFBB sidestepped the fact that the federal government licensed Ashley Dixon’s Stevensville radio station, KFJR, on June 30, 1924, on a frequency of 1160 khz.
C. Howard McDonald then upset that apple cart further, claiming KFDO, Bozeman, was Montana’s first radio station.
But wait – The Montana Standard newspaper also claims to have created Montana’s first radio station.
“In June 1922, Forrest Gray, station operator for the Montana Standard’s new radio station, began broadcasting for one hour each night from station 7-SFL. One month later, the Montana Standard station was assigned the call letters KFAP.”
“In the very early days of radio, broadcasts were not supported by advertising or listener sponsorship. Department and furniture stores created stations to sell radios, and newspapers owned radio stations to sell papers. So it was in Butte.”
But I’ll leave the squabbling to others. I’m just grateful that radio, and later TV, came into being, allowing me to have a most delightful career from my teenage years (1960) to my retirement in 2010.